It's valuable as a collection of many varied and specific concepts of magic as it's expressed in physical items, almost as if they were pieces from dozens of different worlds or times. It could help a gamemaster to run a setting in which magic is little-known and perilous, or has deep history.

A very nice piece of world-building while not at all difficult to fit into a variety of mediaeval-style campaigns (I saw a possibility for Midgard almost at once). A number of espionage-style plots should offer significant tension with a very appropriate fit both for the period and the spy genre.

This presents a collection of interesting, unconnected scenarios involving non-Imperial sentient groups (thus, aliens) with some visible references to the outcomes of previous games early in Traveller's development. An unusual structure, separating player and GM information, would be very well supported by adding bookmarks.

Not a bad dungeon crawl (in orbit, though the map doesn't even try to look like a spaceship) through a prison/research vessel that has been mostly taken over, largely trashed and rendered considerably more dangerous by the former inmates. I may have had a misspent youth and dubious choices in reading matter, but this seemed more restrained, serious and playable than the inferences dropped by the cover and product description might have suggested.

As our heroes investigate the crashed vessel, a mystifying sight reveals its bizarre and horrible fate. Well-developed detail should provide a rich short-run experience. The location may take some thought to fit in to particular settings.

I wanted to see this topic covered well, since (as for a Star Wars game, perhaps) it has a considerable influence in defining the nature of serious ground combat in the setting. An expansion was very much needed for the brief, though descriptive, characterisation in the core setting book.

It provides a good spread of classic vehicles in their development over time, with many illustrations, which are very helpful to grasp the style and nature of each one. Actual size and mass figures might have helped with visualisation though they'd only occasionally be required for game use.

I found the division between "hardsuits" and "combat walkers", that is, more and less humanoid-shaped waldoed vehicles, more corrosive to the uniqueness of the setting than useful. A ground-up design system presents a lot of tables to digest before getting to examples and combat usage, considering that combat walkers are standard models and not commonly built from scratch or heavily customised, and could have been placed later, I feel. Design principles and discussions of how combat walkers are employed could have spent a bit of time on concepts before delving into rules terms and references to (much less criticism of) other rulebooks. Generally it could have been more directed to examine how these classes of equipment fit into this setting and assumed less familiarity with what they are and do in other universes.

I haven't seen volume 1, so may have missed the explanation of what this series is about, where the somewhat novel rules for these items came from and how much is randomly generated (it looks like most of it). Volume 2 just starts into a listing without any preliminaries. I can stand to pay less than a dollar to see a reasonably clever randomiser, wouldn't want it to be more.

This author gets the setting of Numenera, sees clearly what would be incongruous with the Ninth World and what adds to its weirdness and grandeur and gives us more of the latter. A really promising third-party contribution to a relatively new game. I'd hope for more like this.

Rescue Run begins some new adventures as the start of Grendelssaga, which I'd probably call an adventure in three parts plus source material, considering the amount of action versus hints dropped in this instalment. It really brings to life some of those innocuous numbers like "length of day" and "orbital eccentricity", as well as the new edition's elements like DNAMs and Pentapod weirdness.